Review: Dune (1965) by Frank Herbert
I did not know what to expect before reading this book. Hardcore fans would resent me when I say this: I clicked on the movie trailer on YouTube, which I did not particularly took a liking at first, and I did not know jack about Frank Herbert or this wonderful saga of his. It was when I was chewing on a banana and washing it down with some yogurt like a prehistoric barbarian, that I misclicked on the trailer again and got instantaneously hooked onto the detailed, vivid and realistic Sci-Fi feel along with its promising cast. Then I shamelessly robbed my good friend of his precious and well-kept Dune book. When he asked me how I come to suddenly want to read this awesome book, I said nothing about watching the movie trailer. Boy was he excited and eager, and handed me the book like putting his new-born baby in the arms of a drunkard.
I flipped open the smooth cover and got confused by the index page. Dune has 3 chapters, presented in a chronicle order, in the style of something you would see in a real history book. And real history it felt to me. The excerpts from Princess Irulan’s narratives within the narrative of this book introduces the story to readers in the opening, and many other places, overall thread the story together while infusing a sort of feeling to us that we are reading real history. And needless to say, this feel of authenticity and reality serves this book well to make us believe in it. On that, I would like to say that such an experience falls on the one polar of “Fake-Real” spectrum of a fiction work. On the opposite polar stands probably Borges’s and Garcia Marquis’s books, the magical realism.
The characters are mostly dynamic and round. Paul, Jessica and Stilgar, are in my opinion, the best-written ones (Paul of course, being the protagonist) and reading the second half of the book truly makes you feel like witnessing the birth of a messiah, a religious leader, out of Paul.
I also really like the book’s pacing in the first half, all the way until near the end of Chapter Muad’Dib. Everything that comes after, feel a little bit rushed. The pacing that Frank Herbert decided on narrating the war between Fremen and Imperium & Harkonnen is just a little too fast for my taste. I felt like the details of war and the preparation that comes before — though concise and powerful in that — could have been longer. The suspense and foreshadowing created by Paul’s determination at avoiding a future Jihad, holy war, are kind of withheld in the second half of the book and really were nothing more than just foreshadowing.
But, oh well, I realized that maybe Frank intended to refrain from telling us too much about Arrakis and Paul and our machine-less future all at once. Because now there are quite a number of further history books about Paul-Muad’Dib and the life of Arrakis that I am planning to read.
P.S. I decided my 2021’s resolution would be to read 60 books. It is September 26 and only 3, 4 months before the new new year’s resolution! AND I have read……7 books so far, including Dune. Bravo, me! You lazy bum.
